Archive for August, 2009

Back in Beijing again in late July & early August – this time on behalf of Winrock International, a well-known NGO, and home of the American Carbon Registry. USAID recently solicited applications for a new US-China Clean Energy & Climate Partnership, and I was in Beijing to help Winrock put together their partnership team and technical proposal. We have some really great partners, including Peking University’s College of Environmental Science & Engineering; the Asia Foundation; and the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Another very interesting partner is the China Beijing Environment Exchange (CBEEX). I had first met with CBEEX folks on a previous visit, and this time they invited me to the signing ceremony for their first domestic (i.e, China-to-China) Voluntary Emission Reduction (VER) transaction. Check out the CCTV coverage… [& maybe you can find the back of my head??] The Chicago Climate Exchange got its start with exactly such transactions, and we hope that the partnership will open up a new venue in the US for Chinese VERs — much like the Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol currently sold (mostly) in Europe.

Another non-work-related posting – but truly a delightful one. My middle daughter got married in Montana in a beautiful open air ceremony in the mountains, so we headed out to Red Lodge, MT in late July to be there for the happy event. Red Lodge is an old mining town about sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park, and we stayed in a mountain resort a few miles south of town…. and then went over the Beartooth Mountain pass into Wyoming to visit her new in-laws’ summer cabin. Of course, any visit to Wyoming also had to include a stop at the Cody rodeo!

Washoe coal mine remains

Red Lodge was a coal-mining town – it’s the county seat of Carbon County, no less – and nearby Washoe was the site of the deadliest coal mining disaster in Montana’s history. Those mines are all closed today, and most of the state’s coal comes from strip mining.

“Liver-Eating” Johnson’s Cabin

But an even bigger claim-to-fame is that Red Lodge was the home – for a while, anyway – of “Liver Eating” Johnson, whose log cabin is now located near the entrance to town. According to local folklore, Johnson pretty much took on the whole Crow Indian nation after they killed his Flathead Indian wife. A fascinating book about him (Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, R. Thorp & R. Bunker, Univ. of Indiana Press, 1958) became the basis for the 1972 movie “Jeremiah Johnson,” starring Robert Redford. [Warning: the book, written in a different era, is certainly not for the politically correct!] We rented the very scenic & picturesque movie after returning home — & I’m sort of glad it got the glamorized Hollywood treatment it did. Redford is certainly a much better looking guy than the original Johnson — but more importantly, the movie left out all of the liver eating stuff, which played such a big part in the tale of revenge.